Although many things point in the direction of increased speed in academia – that we have to handle more activities per time unit in academia today than previously – we will in this paper use what Rosa calls a subjective approach to the study of time and research integrity (2010, p. 21). We do not attempt to measure the objective changes that have occurred in academia, i.e., the number of activities handled per time unit before and now but will focus on researchers’ experiences of time (pressure) and acceleration in relation to research integrity with the objective to understand researchers’ experience of time and the room for focusing on quality in the research process.
An objective approach would focus on and examine the number of tasks that researchers must handle today compared to previously and ask questions like: “Are the sum of tasks we have to deal with per time unit today bigger than the sum we had to take care of 10, 20, or 30 years ago?”, “Do we (have to) write and publish more today than previously (to get promoted, for example)?”, “Can we detect an acceleration in the number of publications and achievements you need to have on your CV to get a permanent position in academia?” On the other hand, a subjective approach – in our case – is more interested in the researchers’ experience and perception of time pressure, acceleration, and research integrity in the current research system. This approach can provide insights into the way in which researchers think about their own and others research practices, including their perceptions of the current reward and merit system and the effect this system is experienced to have on contemporary knowledge production.
The analysis in the present paper draws on a vast and unique set of data from two completed focus group studies on research cultures and practices in relation to research integrity conditions, challenges, and needs. The secondary analysis performed is based on material from 36 focus group interviews across seven European countries, encompassing a total of 172 researchers.
The first study aimed to study researcher perceptions and practices of questionable research practices (QRPs) across main research fields and across eight Danish Universities. The research fields comprised of the humanities, medical science, technical science, social science and natural science. The focus group study encompassed 22 focus groups with a total of 105 researchers, and it formed part of a nationally funded project on the ‘Practices, Perceptions, and Patters of Research Integrity’ (PRINT 2017-19). The main objective was to survey and explore the state and conditions of research practices, knowledge production and research integrity in Denmark. Table SI1 provides an overview of the groups according to distributed socio-demographic information (see Supplementary Information). Study findings and detailed information on methodology, including research design, sample- and recruitment strategy, have been reported in Ravn and Sørensen (2021).
The second focus group study formed part of an EU funded project concerning ‘Standard Operating Procedures for Research Integrity’ (SOPs4RI 2019-2022). It aimed to examine and promote transformational research integrity processes through European research- and funding organisations. The study conducted 30 focus group interviews across eight European countries and aimed to explore how different research areas perceived and prioritised a variety of different research integrity topics related to research environments, collaborative research, RI breaches, among others, and of relevance to both research and funding organisations. Fourteen focus groups were comprised solely of researchers, while the remaining 16 focus groups included both researchers and relevant stakeholders. In the present study we only use material from the 14 focus group interviews with researchers. Table SI2 in Supplementary Information provides an overview of the 14 focus groups and the distribution of the 67 participants, who took part in these interviews, including research area, stakeholder representation and demographic characteristics. As in the first study, all main research areas were represented in this study (the humanities, social science, natural science incl. technical science and medical science, incl. biomedicine). Study findings and details on methods have been reported in Sørensen et al. (2021) and Sørensen et al. (2020). All focus groups transcripts from this study have been made publicly available in anonymised versions to allow for secondary analyses of the data and to promote open data access (https://osf.io/e9u8t/?view_only=).
Authors MPS and TR led the design, execution, analysis, and reporting of the original studies. The extensive discussions in the 36 focus groups on promoting good research and integrity practices and procedures yielded numerous accounts of researchers lived experiences in academia and their perceptions of time and the research process, which we could not closely examine and report on in Ravn and Sørensen (2021) and Sørensen et al. (2021). These accounts include narratives, experiences and examples of navigating within contemporary academia across countries, institutions, research fields and disciplines, which individually and collectively shed light on the current reward and merit system in academia (cf. Introduction) and its experienced effects on contemporary knowledge production.
The guiding research question for this new, secondary analysis has been: ‘How do researchers across research fields and disciplines experience time pressure and acceleration within academia in relation to research quality and integrity?’ All interview transcripts from the 36 focus groups have been re-coded in NVivo (by author ML), guided by the main research question and hence operationalised according to a number of sub-questions and a theoretically informed coding strategy (cf. ‘Theoretical frame’), which focused on a thematic across case comparison of the focus group data. While the coding strategy was informed by theories of acceleration in academia, the nature of the data supported an explorative and inductive approach, which allowed for emerging and cross-cutting topics of relevance for the secondary analysis. In the reporting of the two original studies, participants were pseudonymised (Ravn and Sørensen 2021; Sørensen et al. 2021; Sørensen et al. 2020) and references to participants after quotes presented only general information, such as type of representation, position, and gender without disclosing any identifying information. The same approach has been adopted in the reporting of the current analysis.
Findings section: Time pressure, declining quality, and the rise of a new merit system
In this section, we first look at the general time pressure that researchers experience in their daily work. We then focus on the experienced time pressure’s impact on, a) the quality of the research produced, and b) the quality assurance system within research. Hereafter, we look at additional research integrity problems – and a few advantages – observed by the interviewees in relation to time pressure and accelerated research processes. Next, the section turns to the experienced reasons for accelerated research processes, before drawing the contours of a new merit and reward system that according to the interviewees dominates contemporary academia and is experienced to be the root cause of many current quality and research integrity problems.
Experienced time pressure
Across the focus groups, interviewees expressed a feeling of working under intensifying time pressure in contemporary academia. Many felt they needed to perform more tasks today than previously and that the allocated time per task was too short. Interviewees reflected on experiences of time shortage and its impact on research from multiple angles. Related to research they, for example, expressed having too little time to read, to collect new data, to conduct in-depth analysis, to comply with relevant regulations, to observe due diligence, and to supervise and mentor. To simply find the time to do research was difficult for many of the researchers.
Below, we will explore the different forms of time pressure experienced by researchers in relation to the different phases of the research process. However, before we examine the different research phases, it should be noted that the interviewees generally experienced a considerable mismatch between expectations and the time available to carry out set tasks. The clashing of research and teaching time as well as research and application time especially stood out in the interviews. Writing applications and teaching often steal time away from research, as illustrated in this quote by a Danish female assistant professor within the social sciences (translated by authors):
Interviewee: “Yeah, so we have two and a half hours of preparation time for a one-hour lecture, right? And I really think so - I spend an enormous amount of research time preparing lessons, and I don’t think I’m the only one who does that.”
Interviewer: “So when do you do research?”
Interviewee: “Well, Sunday evenings (mild laughter).”
Whenever there is a conflict of time between tasks, research seems to have to give way to the other tasks. As an interviewee on a temporary contract explains: “I've been teaching actually for a couple of years now and I've had no time for publishing, so I am actually now waiting for my third contract to run out so that I'll have this obligatory time off to actually do the writing and then hope to get a position somewhere.” (Lecturer, humanities, the Netherlands). However, even though many of the interviewees experienced having very limited time available to do research and write papers, they still felt they had to publish “a lot” to stay in academia: “ […] so that's also what you’ll be measured on next time you have to have a position: How many articles has she published?” (Postdoc, natural science, female, Denmark, translated by authors)
Time pressure and declining quality in the production of knowledge
Across disciplinary fields and countries, the focus group participants express a feeling of being under double pressure. On the one side they feel they must carry out more tasks today than before, and that they have less time for each task compared to earlier. They especially experience a lack of time to do research, and to do it as thoroughly as they would like to. On the other side, they at the same time experience high publication pressure; a feeling of having to publish more than previously to make it in academia (to get grants, a permanent position, or promotions).
The experienced double-pressure leads to a general feeling of lacking time to live up to norms on good research practices within the researchers’ different fields, which is perceived to harm the quality of the research produced. The pressure to publish is in general experienced to prioritize quantity over quality. Detrimental effects on research quality are observed across the entire research process by the interviewees. To shed more light on this, we will use an analytical model for the research process encompassing five phases (cf. Ravn and Sørensen, 2021): the idea generation phase, research design phase, data collection phase, data analysis phase, and research publication and reporting phase.
In the idea generation phase, interviewees state that they lack time to come up with new ideas, and that it is safer for them to reuse old ideas. They likewise feel they have too little time to read the existing literature before they start a new project: ““[…] when you are under a lot of pressure, as we all are due to a large workload, then there is a tendency for people not to have enough time to read the literature within the field properly.” (Professor, humanities, female, Denmark, translation by authors). This is experienced to lead to too identical studies with too small contributions that do not bring a field forward.
In the research design phase, interviewees point out that time pressure leads to fewer ‘high risk, high gain’ studies: “The worst problem with all this publishing pressure is all the stuff that doesn’t get done. We don’t choose a research area with high risk, because we know too well that there is not much chance of the t-statistics becoming significant.” (Associate professor, social science, male, Denmark, translation by authors). The experienced publication pressure thus creates a feeling of not having time to pursue riskier research areas, i.e., areas with more uncertainty where one risks ending up with negative results that will be difficult to get published. Further, interviewees – like e.g., this Danish humanities scholar (professor, male) – express a feeling of not having time to use more advanced or ambitious methods (translated by authors):
“Interviewee: I love doing these long historical analyses, but it is extremely time-consuming. You have to sit and rummage around in various archives and so on. There is no time for that. So what it ends up with often is that I look at what others have done of historical analyses and then I start to cannibalize a bit on this. And sometimes I work from there and find some data myself, right? But sometimes I end up doing a reinterpretation of the historical analyses, and see them in a different light, right? Sometimes I add a few additional sources, instead of starting from scratch myself. I definitely don’t have time for that.
Interviewer: It makes for poorer research?
Interviewee: I think so. In any case, it does not produce the research with originality that could have been done if I had had the time to do it.”
Like this scholar, many interviewees express a feeling of not having enough time to collect the most relevant data during the data collection-phase. Because of the perceived pressure to publish, which is experienced to stem from institutions’ bibliometric point systems and from career related competition, data collection risks becoming an activity where researchers think more about time issues than about collecting the most optimal data for a given research project:
“There, I mostly just think that I have to get those points [for the bibliometric assessment system used in this institution], and how can I do that most easily - meaning, how can I get as much as possible as fast as possible, what kind of data can I most easily access? Instead of thinking I have to do field work for three months in [name of place] again, I don't have time for that at all. […] Then you think creatively that way, and it is not necessarily questionable research, because it can be both real and valid. But you think in a different way, because there is this [name of bibliometric assessment system …]. For me, it affects what I study.” (Assistant professor, humanities, female, Denmark, translated by authors)
Career considerations – competition for grants, positions, and promotions – more than research quality considerations seem to dictate the perception of how much time one can afford to use on data collection. In a focus group within clinical-translational medicine, an interviewee describes his experience of a speeded up contemporary research culture by talking about a younger colleague’s reaction to a story about a clinician, who used four years on collecting data for a study. The young colleague’s reaction to the story is also a perfect example of what Müller (2014) calls ‘anticipatory acceleration’. According to the interviewee, the young colleague said:
“Shit, he [the clinician] must be stupid. Spending so much time collecting that data to be able to write those two articles. That’s completely crazy. Over here, we can do this and that and that, and then we have 10 articles. And if you haven't done that, then you're already behind from the start […]” (Associate professor, medical science, male, Denmark, translated by authors).
In the data analysis-phase interviewees likewise point to multiple examples of suboptimal research processes, due to lack of resources and a feeling of time pressure and competition: “[…] the vast majority of research groups do not have the resources to really check things through and to spend too much time on it, and some of the groups that do really well do so precisely because they don't […]” (Associate professor, medical science, male, Denmark, translated by authors).
In individual projects, career considerations is perceived to be the primary reason for using suboptimal processes together with the organization of research – the projectification of research (Ylijoki, 2015) – which means that one has a fixed number of years to do a research project, e.g. a PhD project, and not the time it takes to do the research, including thoroughly checking one’s results:
“But what I have experienced myself and around me is that there is sort of a time pressure especially when your PhD contract is almost finished. So, maybe at some point, you don't do this extra analysis, you don't extra check these outputs. And so, I feel like maybe it's the risk in my case or around me is more like sloppiness a little bit. Because you just want to be very efficient with your time.” (Postdoc, medical science, female, the Netherlands).
To use Ylijoki’s (2015) terminology, the interviewee points to a mismatch between project time (finishing on time) and process time (doing the extra checks and analyses) and like most interviewees in our study clearly feels that project time trumps process time whenever there is a conflict between them.
Finally, if we look at the publication and reporting-phase interviewees here feel they have too little coherent time for writing. Lack of time for writing leads to the speeding up of the process, resulting in a lack of finesse in the form – such as style of writing – to a more profound impact on the content of a given publication. This is also the case in collaborative projects, where it can be hard to find the time to thoroughly discuss and combine the different parts of a publication before it is submitted:
“It becomes more like that we just share the work, "you do this, you do that", and then we put it together, and then of course we all read it through. And then it's often the case that it takes off in three different directions, because we didn't have time to sit down and thoroughly discuss the concepts and how to do it.” (Professor, humanities, female, Denmark, translated by authors).
Time pressure and the declining quality of the quality assurance system
As the previous subsection shows, there is a feeling among the interviewees that the quality of the research produced is harmed by the time pressure they experience. However, time pressure not only diminishes the quality of the research produced; it also harms academia’s quality assurance system, not least the peer review system. One interviewee, who is also a journal editor, describes the development in this way:
“I'm an editor for a couple of journals, and to me it's very difficult to find good reviewers, even to find reviewers, is very difficult because people think that this is a waste of time, or some people think that this is a waste of time, and they prefer to work on their own studies, ignoring that the peer review process is the basis of the system, is the way science works. And also in the way the reviewers look at the papers, sometimes there is clear conflict of interest that editors not always deal with. Uhm and the quality of reviews is not always the quality that you should expect.” (Senior researcher, natural science, male, Spain).
Some senior academics deal with the time pressure related to peer review by accepting review tasks but passing them on to one of their PhD students or postdocs. In some cases, senior researchers take the time to talk to their younger colleagues about the strengths and weaknesses of a paper, in other cases they just let the PhD-students do the reviews without any guidance. In general, time pressure can also lead to insufficient supervision of PhD students. For competition and prestige reasons, the number of PhD students that some senior academics supervise is increasing with potential negative impact on the supervision of the students. Interviewees describe how the lack of time for prober supervision leads to PhD-students submitting substandard papers to journals and conferences.
The lack of time to do thorough reviews of PhD students’ research and to do in-depth journal peer reviews also applies for the work that goes on in the hiring and appointing system within academia. When applicants submit papers as part of an application, assessment committee members do not always have time to read the papers. Instead, they rely on metrics despite knowing that this is a suboptimal way of evaluating researchers’ work:
“And if I'm in a panel of reviewing some applications or something like that, I do get credited a little bit of money, but I have so little time to do it, I mean, it's just not. And that's the reason why we end up focusing on these index numbers, which is bullshit of course.” (Associate professor, natural science, male, Denmark)
Finally, when researchers notice that there might be integrity problems in the work of peers, they for time reasons do not always react to this. When they do, it is experienced to be very time consuming: “Everybody forgets how time consuming it is to prove misconduct. It takes months of work.” (Senior researcher, medical science, male, Greece).
Further experienced impact on research integrity
When listening to the interviewees in our study, there is no doubt that accelerated research processes and time pressure in general are experienced to harm research integrity. Researchers across disciplinary fields find it hard to live up to norms of good research practices because of time pressure and speeded up research processes. Although, as we shall see below, the current system also leads to changes in practice that can be beneficial to research integrity, the main narrative emerging in our study is that time pressure and accelerated research processes are detrimental to research integrity. Some interviewees even couple these processes directly to the use of QRPs or at least point out that QRPs become more attractive in a system focusing on speed and with high publication pressure:
“I’m afraid we work in a very high-tension field, and everybody is forced to publish as quickly as possible to become eligible for the grants, and yeah I'm afraid this is where integrity becomes damaged […] Yeah, p-hacking, and I guess really people would be tempted to go into the grey area. Maybe not outright fraud, but: ‘Can I remove an outlier still?, Can I test this in another way?, or coming up with hypotheses after the data has been gathered” (Assistant professor, social science, male, the Netherlands).
Time pressure might tempt some researchers to manipulate their analyses to show stronger positive effects, to ensure the publication is published and avoid the loss of time that would result from a failure to publish:
“(…) you cannot publish anything which doesn’t show effect, or something. So, in order to get publications which are necessary, and because they're an indicator of your performance, there is a really strong incentive, in my opinion, for scientific misconduct, for faking data …” (Senior researcher, social sciences, male, Germany).
The current merit system is also understood to encourage researchers to publish small and insignificant papers: ““[…] we are flooded with publications that don’t matter to anyone.” (Associate professor, natural science, male, Denmark). The pressure to publish is experienced to lead to an overproduction of publications with very limited contribution or novelty: “One basically produces ten times too many or 50 times too many articles. [...] They are just too close to each other. There is too little new.” (Associate professor, natural science, male, Denmark, translation by authors).
Unfair assignments of authorships and authorship conflicts also seem to flourish in this system. The strong focus on quantity and researchers’ need to boost their publication lists turn authorship discussions into a form of gift economy:
“[…] there is a clear tendency of people saying implicitly that ‘if you put me on your paper, I'll put you on my paper’, and then you see these papers with 10 or 15 authors, and essentially there is one who has done all the work, and the rest is just on for the ride. The problem is […] whoever has the most publications win and we need to break that, otherwise things are gonna move in a really bad direction.” (Associate professor, natural science, male, Denmark)
Authorships are used as a form of currency that can repay old favors or make collaborations run more smoothly: “[…] we depend on the [name of] departments […] and sometimes that means that you add an author to a paper where the contribution is a bit, uhm, less than five percent […]” (Associate Professor, medical science, female, Denmark).
However, as mentioned above, besides the main narrative – that time pressure and speeded up knowledge production processes are bad for research integrity – a side story also emerged in the interviews. Some focus group participants from the humanities as well as the natural sciences expressed that besides the detrimental aspects of this development, there were also some positive elements. These views emerged during discussions on increasing publication rates, the peer review process, and pressure to publish at different career stages. For example, a natural science researcher pointed out that the increased focus on publications had given PhD students the opportunity to learn how to write papers and to practice their writing skills. In the humanities, several scholars pointed out that the development from writing articles and books in national languages to focusing more on international journal articles – stimulated by new bibliometric-focused research assessment systems – had led to more widespread use of peer review within the humanities, which again was perceived to have led to improvements in the overall quality of publications within different fields within the humanities:
“I would say that, on the one hand, there is a tendency to proceed quickly and produce as much as possible, […] But it is also within the past ten years that peer review has become more common with us, compared to what it used to be. It has also led to an increase in quality, whereas some things that would have slipped through in the past, now these are weeded out” (Associate professor, humanities, male, Denmark).
The experienced reasons for the increased time pressure
But what then is causing this dominating feeling of time pressure in relation to research tasks? As already mentioned, teaching is by many interviewees perceived to take up more time than what is allocated to it and in this way, it eats up research time. As the university’s dependence on external funding increases, researchers now also have to spend more time applying for grants than before: “[…] less time is actually spent on the actual research and more on writing applications and the competition we all know is getting harder and harder.” (Associate professor, humanities, female, Denmark). The combination of increasing demands for external funding and decreasing success rates puts extra pressure on researchers’ time. However, winning a grant does not necessarily take off pressure and provide more time for the single steps in the research process. To the contrary, winning a grant might lead to even more time pressure: “In order to get proposals accepted, you have to promise to do more than you actually think you can achieve.” (Postdoc, technical science, male, Denmark, translation by authors). Especially early career researchers seem to be under a great deal of pressure to get the right grants to be able to move on in the research system: “[…] when you finish your PhD, it's ‘make it or break it’, […] then you have two years to create the results or the CV that will get you the job, because there are fewer and fewer grants to apply for when you get a little further [into the postdoc period].” (Associate professor, natural science, male, Denmark, translated by authors). If they are successful in getting a grant, pressure then comes from getting the results they promised in the application: “[…] if you are a young group leader, this does not only apply to Denmark, it applies to the whole world, then you are typically hired on some interesting hypothesis, or some other interesting concept, and then it has to work, that is, if it doesn’t work […] then it is almost over for you.” (Associate professor, medical science, male, Denmark, translation by authors).
When listening to the interviewees, it becomes clear that time pressure is closely linked to competition, i.e., that competition for grants, positions, and promotions lead to ‘anticipatory acceleration’ (Müller 2014) and an experience of time pressure. As one of the interviewees explain: “as soon as you become a PhD it’s not nice but you're competing with your colleagues, you're competing with the other PhDs because there's only going to be so many assistant professor positions, and after assistant professor there are only so many in the tracks, so I think the pressure with us is very real.” (Assistant professor, social science, male, the Netherlands). The career system is further tied to a general projectification (Ylijoko, 2015) of academic work, including research:
“To me, that's where the pressure lies. It's in how quickly you have to get things out. Also, because there... Now again, I think it is very typical for research careers that there are many projects, both project assignments and that things are generally very project-driven, where there is a clear deadline for when things must be finished. That might put extra pressure on top.” (Associate professor, humanities, male, Denmark, translation by authors).
The project format has thus become a standard modus operandi in academia (Ylijoko, 2015; Felt, 2017). At the point of conception, studies are subject to accommodating the project format, hinged to fixed timelines, predictability of findings, the feasibility of positive results, and inflexibility of research design. Working in project-related temporary positions also means you always need to have your next position in mind. In this way, one’s current research practice becomes – at least partly – shaped by one’s perception of what will secure one’s next position.
The current reward and merit system
As we have seen in the quotes above, interviewees express a clear understanding of what counts in the current merit and reward system in academia. Interviewees’ understanding of this system was remarkably homogeneous across the 36 focus group interviews, i.e., across interviewees’ seniority, disciplinary and national backgrounds, so much so that we on this basis will attempt to draw the contours of the dominating contemporary reward and merit system in academia. It’s important to emphasise that this is the system as it looks through the eyes of the interviewees or rather as it shows itself in the narratives of the interviewed researchers in our study. It can be understood as a form of ideal type (Weber, 1949) system that in its purest form probably does not exist anywhere. Nevertheless, it can help us understand where the pressure on research quality, described above, is perceived to come from.
The system, which could be termed ‘the quantitative assessment system’, is summarised in Table 1. The left side of the table represents the dominating way of thinking about the current reward and merit system among the focus group participants – ‘the quantitative assessment system’ – and the right side represents the contrast to this system, ‘the qualitative assessment system’. The elements on the right side are a mix of interviewees’ wishes for how it ought to be and stories of how it used to be, e.g., that there used to be more room for being thorough and to be able to wait with publications until one had substantial results, as e.g. expressed by this interviewee:
"... to some extent, we compromise all the time [in relation to the depth of the research carried out and to publications]. […] we might think that this is not a problem we will get to the bottom of, and perhaps in the old days we would have said, ‘Well, I'll continue with this for 20 years until I can deliver a thesis of 100 pages or more, and then I've sort of answered this question.’ No, now when you've got some data and you think you have enough for a publication, off it goes...” (Associate professor, natural science, male, Denmark, translation by authors).
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Table 1. Two ideal type reward and merit systems
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Ideal type 1: The quantitative assessment system
This is the current system, which according to the interviewees rewards and/or encourage:
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Ideal type 2: The qualitative assessment system
This is the system as it ought to be or was in the past, according to the interviewees. It rewards and/or encourage:
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Quantity
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Quality
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Projectification and focus on ‘project time’
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Room for ‘process time’
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Papers
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Books and more comprehensive papers
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Incremental steps (salami slicing)
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Substantial contribution (giving full accounts of findings in publications)
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Playing it safe (knowing that you will get results)
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Taking risks (blue ocean, basic research)
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Copying and reusing ideas, approaches, designs, data, etc.
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Originality, advanced methods, and time to do extra data collection
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To be fast
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To be thorough
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Strategic thinking (related to career)
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Joy of work
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To publish as much as possible and as soon as you have first results
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To publish when you have substantial results
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More authors per paper
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More strict interpretations of what it takes to be a co-author
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Focus on writing and output
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Focus on reading and process
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Knowledge production as a means to an end (points in an assessment system, individual careers, new grants, solve pre-defined problems etc.)
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Knowledge production as a goal in itself (enlightenment, deepening our understanding of Nature and the world etc.)
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Ideal type researcher: The successful head of a lab or research unit, who is constantly applying for new grants and who gets his name on all papers from that unit by just reading and commenting on them.
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Ideal type researcher: the Nobel prize laurate, who pursued a bold idea that nobody believed in, and who via basic funding from the university spent decades to study a problem (Jens Christian Skou)
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These stories of how it used to be resemble what Ylijoki (2005) calls academic nostalgia and Felt (2017) refers to as a golden past, “when there was still time to think, when there was virtually no talk of careers and strategic planning, when research was not necessarily tied to finding a format that fitted the project logic, and when speed and efficiency were not the primary concerns” (p.2). Interviewees do not seem to believe that this was how it really was in the old days, but they use these descriptions to point out what current academia is not. Even more than the contemporary system, these counterexamples must therefore likewise be understood as an ideal type that has never existed in a pure form anywhere.
The contemporary reward and merit system can – as an ideal type – be summarised as a system that prioritises quantity to quality: the more papers and grants you have, the better you will do in the current system. This encourages strategic thinking and ‘playing it safe’. As a researcher you need to know that you will end up with publishable results before you start a research process. Otherwise, you jeopardize your career. In the present system, knowledge production becomes a means to an end. Research is carried out to get points in an assessment system, to benefit individual careers, to get new grants, and to solve pre-defined problems that the researcher knows can be solved. In this system, researchers are rewarded for reusing data, approaches, designs, ideas etc. Speed and to publish as much as possible as soon as possible is prioritised. Instead of collecting more data, doing a more comprehensive analysis, or getting a fuller picture of what is going on, the system encourages researchers to publish as soon as they have first results. In this system, the number of co-authors also increases because of the focus on number of papers: the more co-authors, the more papers the individual researcher “can produce”, and the better he or she will stand in the competition. The ideal researcher in this merit and reward system is the successful head of a department or lab, who constantly has an eye out for new funding opportunities and who gets his name on all the papers from the research unit by simply reading and commenting on paper drafts. The counterexample, mentioned in one of the Danish focus groups, is the Nobel laurate, physiologist Jens Christian Skou (1918-2018) from Aarhus University, who got the Nobel prize in Chemistry in 1997. Skou said on many occasions that he would never have been able to do the research that led to the Nobel prize – awarded for the discovery of the sodium-potassium pump – in the current system: “When I claimed that an enzyme could transport ions, people said I was talking nonsense. I would never have been given the funding to investigate this under the current system." (Jespersgaard, 2018).